MARTHE ROBIN A CHOSEN SOUL An Anthology Père Michel Tierney, Martin Blake and David Fanning
All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE
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CONTENTS Charity and Love ...........................................................3 A Meeting with Marthe Robin ...................................20 A Chosen Soul ..............................................................26 The First Foyer of Charity ..........................................57 Some Prayers Composed by Marthe Robin ..............63 Daily Prayers in the Foyers of Charity ......................70 A Retreat in a Foyer of Charity .................................72
Acknowledgements CTS is grateful to Editions Le Livre Ouvert for their kind permission to publish the English language translation of ‘Marthe Robin, une âme d’élite’ by Père Michel Tierny, included here as ‘Marthe Robin, A Chosen Soul’ and translated by Martin Blake. CTS thanks David Fanning for his kind permission to include his work ‘Marthe Robin, Charity and Love’. Thanks are also due to Martin Blake for supervising the collection and ordering of the material gathered here. All rights reserved. First published 1999 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road, London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. Copyright © 1999 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society. 978 1 86082 064 9
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CHARITY AND LOVE by David Fanning Heroic witness and prophet A woman of great courage and strength, with a deep love of Christ and the Church, Marthe Louise Robin was born on 13 March 1902 at Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, near Lyons in south-eastern France; she died there on 6 February 1981, aged 78, having been bedridden and almost totally paralysed or more than half a century. Marthe Robin was a straightforward countrywoman with a gentle and witty turn of phrase, ready always to listen to anyone and advise them where to turn in their hour of need. She spoke easily and knowledgeably of prayer, of God, of Jesus, and of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She was widely loved and greatly revered, and her funeral in 1981 was attended by thousands of mourners, including six bishops and more than 200 priests. During her lifetime and in the years since, her message and example and her spiritual fervour and encouragement have given great inspiration and direction to many men and women, of all ages and from all walks of life.
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She had a particularly deep and burning devotion to Our Lady, and tried to live in the closest union with Christ, dedicating her sufferings to him and ready to share fully in his passion and death. In October 1930, she received the stigmata, the marks of the passion, and each Friday thereafter she underwent the most racking and intense pains of his death on the Cross. In her prayers, Our Lord revealed a vision of a new Pentecost of love. God’s call was for the renewal of the Church, through the apostolate of consecrated lay men and women living together in communities of prayer and work. The communities would be called ‘Foyers de Lumière, de Charité et d’Amour’ - centres or homes of light, charity and love. This was Marthe Robin’s principal message: we must follow Jesus with the help and power of Mary. During her life, Marthe met tens of thousands of people who visited her at home in the small room to which she was confined for most of her life. She spent around ten minutes with each visitor, enjoying an open and free conversation that often shed light on a person’s problem or concern and always ended with a simple prayer. In addition to those men and women she met at her bedside, she dealt with an unending flow of letters, despite losing her sight when she was only 38. She left a quantity of influential spiritual writings, and many of her insights, inspirations and instructions were written down by Père
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Georges Finet, her spiritual director and co-founder of the worldwide network of Foyers de Charité. Her writings and spiritual counsel both illuminated the problems and challenges facing the Catholic Church in her own lifetime and foreshadowed today’s calls for evangelisation and renewal and for more lay involvement in the Church. She was one of the most inspiring women of the present century, a rare and heroic witness to the passion and death of Jesus Christ, an extraordinary Christian and, in the words of one of her biographers, ‘a treasure of the Church’. Childhood Joseph and Amélie Robin were simple peasant farmers, with a small farm on a plateau above the valley of the Galaure river in the Drôme department of south-eastern France. On Thursday, 13 March 1902, two weeks before Easter, their sixth child was born: Marthe Louise, a sister for Célina, the eldest daughter then aged 13, Gabrielle, Alice, Clémence and Henri, the only boy. Three weeks later, on the first Saturday in April, Marthe was baptised in the parish church of St Bonnet-de-Galaure; her brother Henri, aged 6, was her godfather and her sister Alice, aged few, was her godmother. Illness and tragedy struck the Robin family the year after Marthe’s birth; a typhoid fever epidemic caused the death of Clémence, then aged 5, and seriously affected Marthe, whose health thereafter remained fragile.
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The young Marthe was a cheerful and happy child, always willing to do whatever was asked of her and thoughtful of others. The marriage of her sister Célina in 1908 was a particularly joyous occasion for the six-yearold Marthe, who danced enthusiastically and joined in the celebrations to the full. She began school that year also, walking two kilometres each morning and evening with her sisters to the village school at Châteauneuf-deGalaure. More often than not she arrived late, her poor health slowing her down, and her studies suffered. At the age of 10, she made her first Holy Communion and this marked a turning point in her life; she was to say later that she believed that Our Lord had taken possession of her at that moment. Marthe was a prayerful child, praying to the Holy Spirit as often as she could, but usually in secret, particularly in her bed at night. Her rosary beads were her constant companion: ‘When I went to the village on errands, I always had my beads in my pocket, and I said the rosary as I went along’. She left school at 14, without any educational certificates, and settled into the normal day-to-day life of a young French peasant girl of her age, working in the house and in the fields. She was happy and content with her life and her family, enjoying the countryside and the companionship of her brother and sisters. They also had the friendship of neighbouring families, and the youngsters were in and out of each other’s homes all the time. Marthe
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joined in with all the gusto of carefree youth, laughing, singing, dancing, and telling funny stories. She enjoyed real happiness. Suffering Two years later, her health deteriorated and she began to endure severe headaches. One day in November 1918, she fell in the house and was unable to raise herself. Partially paralysed and stricken by a debilitating and mysterious illness (possibly some form of sleeping sickness or inflammation of the brain), she spent the following thirty months in a near comatose state, obviously in pain and suffering, crying out on occasions. She hardly moved or spoke, she ate practically nothing, and she dozed virtually all the time. It was thought that she would die and in April 1921, aged 19, she received the last rites of the Church. To everyone’s astonishment, she rallied instantly and demanded to get up. Marthe recovered her strength slowly and could walk only with the aid of sticks. She spent a great part of the next few years quietly embroidering baby clothes, reading, and praying, sitting in an armchair in the kitchen. In the spring of 1922, she was looking after her sister Gabrielle’s house nearby, while Gabrielle was absent in Marseilles. Poking around in the attic, Marthe opened an old trunk and found a book of religious reflections (maybe, ‘The Secret of Mary’, by St Louis de
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Montfort.) Two phrases in the book made an immediate impression on her: ‘Your way will be one of suffering’ and ‘One must give God everything’. Shortly after this, Marthe’s health worsened again. Her eyesight weakened and she could walk now only with great difficulty. It was arranged that she should go on the diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes, but at the last minute Marthe gave up her place in favour of a sick person from a neighbouring village. Marthe offered her suffering to Christ, and on 15 October 1925 when she was 23, she set down the first of her spiritual writings, many of which were dictated to various women friends and are regarded as family treasures by members of the Foyers. In ‘Consécration Totale de Victime d’Amour’, an act of complete abandonment to the will of God, she wrote at length about love and made herself a living sacrifice to God: ‘O adorable Saviour! You are the unique possessor of my soul and of all my being! Receive the sacrifice that each day and at every moment I offer you in silence’. She dedicated her prayers and suffering to ‘the good of the millions of hearts that do not love you, for the conversion of sinners, for the return of those who have gone astray and the infidels, for the holiness and apostolate of all your well-loved priests, and for all creatures’. From that time on, Marthe had one overwhelming objective in life: to offer herself entirely to God.
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Surrender In October 1926, she became seriously ill once more and was again given the last sacraments. Marthe had long been a lover of Thérèse Martin, the saintly Carmelite nun of Lisieux who had died in 1897 at the aged of 24 and whose ‘little way’ of simple, childlike and trusting Christianity had become so popular throughout France. Thérèse had been canonised in 1925 and now appeared to Marthe in three separate visions. The saint told Marthe that she was not going to die but that she would live and carry on Thérèse’s mission, making it more universal. About this time, Marthe said that ‘suffering is the best school in which to learn true love’ and she constantly offered her pain and her anguish to God. Eighteen months later, her legs became twisted and permanently paralysed; in her mind, God was simply taking what she had already offered him. A local carpenter made a small divan and it was placed in a downstairs bedroom; on that divan Marthe was to spend the rest of her life. Soon afterwards, she lost the use of her hands. She was now paralysed from head to foot, unable to eat and drink, and without even the solace of sleep. The most her parents could do for her was to wash her and occasionally moisten her lips with water or coffee. From then on, for the next fifty years until she died in 1981, the only sustenance taken by Marthe was the
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Eucharist, which she received once a week, generally on a Wednesday. Her preparation for holy communion was intense. In the morning she reaffirmed her vows of October 1925, and appeared excited and eager; in the evening she would make her confession, an Act of Reconciliation, and then receive the Eucharist from the parish priest. She entered a state of ecstasy after receiving the Body of Christ, only returning to normal during the morning or afternoon of the following day. Marthe was 28 when she received the stigmata, the marks of the passion of Christ on her hands, feet, body and head. It was the end of September 1930 when Jesus Christ appeared in a vision to Marthe and asked whether she wanted to be like him. Her reply was clear and immediate: ‘Let the Lord’s will be done!’ Three days later, she was again visited by the crucified Jesus. Passion As she described later, she found herself raised in the air before Christ on the Cross. Her arms were stretched out towards the Cross, and a tongue of flame shot from Christ’s heart, split into two forks and pierced Marthe’s hands. In the same way, her crippled legs were straightened and the flames pierced her feet. She said she felt as if her life was being drawn from her. A dart of fire entered her chest and encircled and pierced her heart, which remained faint and aching for
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several hours. Then Christ pressed down his crown of thorns on her head. Marthe said that Christ told her: ‘Now I shall call you my little one, crucified with love. After my Mother, it is you who will live my Passion to the fullest’. In the morning, Marthe’s mother washed the blood from the young woman’s body. The marks of the crucifixion were to remain for the rest of Marthe’s life, and she regularly shed drops of blood from the wounds. Thereafter, on the Friday of each week she relived the Passion of Christ. From time to time, as she endured Christ’s torment in her own body, she would call out his words from the cross and ask God for help and relief. Then, late in the afternoon she would let out a strange cry before her head fell backwards on the bed, as if she had died. Marthe would remain in that state for several hours, and be quiet for the next day or two. Though Marthe would cry out and pray aloud during the weekly passions until around 1948, after that time each week’s events took place in absolute silence. It was as if she were fully united in Christ and in a secret place. A modest and unassuming woman, Marthe refused to speak of the passions and torments that marked her life and never mentioned the stigmata and the blood that flowed from those wounds. She did not talk about not eating or drinking or about not sleeping. All these were things to be lived as part of her complete surrender to the will and love of Christ.